Dune: Awakening’s Blood and Ice Expansion Launches December 1 Free

Funcom’s next free expansion for Dune: Awakening, Blood and Ice, launches on December 1, 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox, and it brings a frozen new map called the Polar Sink with around 35 hours of new progression. Funcom has not published a launch hour for December 1.

The Polar Sink inverts the survival loop the rest of the game is built on. Instead of protecting yourself from extreme heat, you are looking for ways to stay warm, and desert gear has to be upgraded before it can take the cold. The Polar Sink is the frozen north of Arrakis, and it arrives with two biomes. In the tundra, wealthy water shipper families defend lavish strongholds. Beyond them lies the heavily guarded ice cap, where getting access to ice is a central goal. For example, ice you harvest in the Polar Sink can cool your base equipment and speed up production, and resources found only there let you craft new survival gear. The expansion also adds new vehicle modules, augments and specialization traits. Funcom says future updates will add more reasons to come back to the region.

The expansion is free for all players on all platforms. The base game is already on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox, and it is included in Xbox Game Pass, the subscription service, and Funcom says more than one million new players have joined since the console launch.

The same developer update that announced the expansion covered three features players have been asking for. Offline single-player arrives in November 2026. Character copying, which lets you move a character from multiplayer servers to single-player and from single-player to selected private or self-hosted servers on PC, arrives in January 2027. Full cross-play also arrives in January 2027. Funcom also opened a cosmetics store for outfits, vehicle variants and base customization. It starts with a rotating selection that includes looks taken from the Dune films, timed to Dune: Part Three, the third film in the series, hitting cinemas in December 2026. Funcom says those purchases are meant to support continued development and free updates, and that a later update will put the full catalog up permanently.

Events are getting a bigger role too. The current event, The Scourge, has players investigating a disease spreading across Arrakis, and Water Crisis follows shortly after Blood and Ice, where players fight over scarce water. A new Events tab ships with the expansion so you can track event progress and rewards. Funcom plans to run events more often, with new stories and free rewards.

For players, the practical takeaway is that December 1 is a free-content drop rather than a paywall, and that the Polar Sink is a full survival map with its own crafting loop, not a side activity. The store is a new layer on a game Funcom says it wants to keep updating for free, so December 1 is also the day optional spending starts. You can see what we already have on the game in our Dune: Awakening page.

The two things worth watching are the cosmetics store and the cross-play date. A survival MMO is easier to recommend when more people are in the world with you, and Funcom is keeping characters on multiplayer, single-player and private servers apart until January 2027. The store is also a change of model: Funcom says cosmetics purchases will help fund continued development and free updates, which puts optional spending right next to the content it is meant to support.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report